Quote:
Originally Posted by White Tie
That might well be a very long time away, however, so your thoughts are invited.
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Hey WT, although this might be mostly OT, here's some feedback from a plugin POV..
one ~related annoying thing:
^^ ugly buttons. the pb here is that the themer has assumed his buttons will always be at a given place, in a given order (the transport toolbar in this case).
It's a screenshot of rado but it's just for the example: all themes have these kind of problems in one way or another...
IMO, themers should really make "agnostic GUI bits", I mean GUI bits that could be used anywhere, in any order, any position, etc.
This is especially truefor all "gen_*.png" images, e.g. gen_knob_bg_small.png.
This is because of:
1) WALTER: GUI bits can be hidden/moved - as bradleyfilms just said above
2) Sinkable extensions, sinkable VST plugins: it is technically possible to do that, but such plugins would look bad ATM. For ex, I'm updating my VSTs these days and I've just dropped skin support because of this. Also, in the S&M extension, I had to replace most of image buttons with text ones because of that too, etc..
3) Sinkable JS effects someday? this is almost already possible..
Another thing that annoys me: I am somehow "forced" to design poor GUIs, themable, sure, but poor. seems minor but it's important to me because... you know.. "OMG! This looks cheap!"
This "issue" is out of the hands of themers -I know- but it would be great if themes had a minimal set of GUI bits - beginning with a dropdown, a tick box & radio buttons, I mean multi-states bitmaps like:
... and since I'm on it:
Another annoying thing is the bad use of 3D colors.
In many themes, 3D highlight = 3D shadow = bg color. I understand why (I made a theme myself..) but this is not cool. for ex, the SWS extension has to "fix" this at runtime. As far as I can tell, only the v4 default theme manages 3D colors properly.
One other common problem is missing or incorrect pink lines.
This is most especially important for toolbar_blank.png (this image MUST be stretchable, and even larger than "double-width toolbar buttons"). Again, the v4 default is OK.
I'm pretty sure I've faced little other theming issues too.. but I can't remember them ATM :/